Trek 2009

No, not that one:We got back an hour ago from our LDS Stake's "Welcome to the valley" celebration for Trek 2009. The kids are now in bed. They were pretty good troopers for most of the day, but the activities definitely weren't geared toward them. We still haven't quite figured out how to best deal with our little toddler children at church social functions. Despite our frantic tracking of our children, we still could appreciate the scope of the event and imagine how cool it must have been for the youth.

A bit of background if you are reading this and not LDS (Mormon). I am LDS, and I attend a congregation in Billerica, except we call them wards. A group of wards forms a larger organization called a stake. The Billerica ward is part of the Nashua NH stake of the LDS church. The Nashua NH stake covers an area from Stow MA to Wilmington MA to Manchester NH to Keene NH and even out into Vermont a bit. It's about half a dozen wards (a little less, I think).

Stakes typically do a yearly multi-day activity for the youth (ages 14-18) in the summer. This year our stake did "Trek." Trek is a partial reenactment of the Mormon pioneer exodus to Salt Lake City. There are obvious limitations in terms of scope and feasibility in the Trek, but it gives the youth a taste and makes the Mormon pioneer heritage a little more real. Trek uses handcarts.

After going on a seventeen mile trip pulling handcarts, they reached their destination. That's where other members of the stake were invited to come and play games and then welcome the youth "into the valley" at the end of their journey. That was from 3-6 pm today. We were late and so only heard the cheers as the handcarts came into the valley. Luckily they came back out of the valley and then parked, so we got to watch them anyway.

The whole experience earned a front page story on two newspapers. I cannot find the second one on the web, but you can read the article by the Nashua Telegraph. They also shot some nice video:

For those of you who are not LDS and/or not from the Nashua Stake: Jay Cooprider is my dad, and he is the current ecclesiastical leader for the stake. I just don't want you to get confused with all the Coopriders floating around.